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The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2009

How to Drive a Robot

Oct. 15 & 16

The last few years have witnessed some great strides in the field of autonomous mobile robotics. On Earth, autonomous ground vehicles have been driving through environments ranging from forests to suburban streets, while rovers on Mars have spent several years negotiating rock fields, craters and sand dunes. This talk will look at some of the key challenges of autonomous mobile robot navigation with a particular focus on the problem of perceiving and understanding the world. It will give an overview of key sensing technologies and algorithms such as stereo vision, laser ranging and visual localization, and will describe their application to wheeled and legged vehicles on Earth and Mars.